This is the talk I prepared to present in my humanities class. I am supposed topresent this tomorrow, oh its 2 am already, I need to present this 7 hours later.
Hi class, in the next 5 minutes or so I am going to be talking about programming languages from a little different point of view.
So in case you are wondering, why would anyone choose Programming Languages as a topic to speak about in a Humanities Lecture, well my curious friend, the reason I choose this topic is because I wanted to choose something which was interesting and geeky enough to motivate me to write 5 pages about it, only very few topics qualified for that spot one of them was programming languages.
Even though the topic is quite technical, I have tried my best to keep it dilute enough so that everyone can understand. How well have I succeeded in this attempt of min, the next few minutes shall reveal.
Begin:
Programming Languages
So what the hell are programming languages ?
As I see it, a programming language is a means to communicate with the computer and give shape to your ideas.It is precise set of instructions which you pass into the computer which then gets converted to machine code in the form of 0s and 1s which the computer then executes. Examples include
It consists of 3 main components, syntax semantics and documentation/community.
I have an interesting analogy to explain these terms,
Semantics is the very soul of a language, it refers to the meaning of the language.
Syntax is the surface for of a language , much like the skeleton in a mammal.
Documentation and community defines the appearance of the language and how it is perceived by the public in general.Open source languages tend to have excellent documentation and a helpful community ready to help you getting started with it.
Programming languages are classified into 5 generations and 3 categories, namely procedural , structured and object oriented programming languages.But I would be skipping those details features like encapsulation , polymorphism , parallelism, because howsoever exciting they may sound, by all means it is after all a humanities class.
Why you should learn to program ?
It gives you wings
Programming gives you incredible power, everyone of you owns a computing device, which has has a processor of the order of GHz, this means that it runs around 1,000,000,000 cycles per second, that is enormous, learning to program gives you the ability to execute instructions on the scale of 1 billion per second.
It will help you understand the world around you. You can understand how the apps in your smart phone work and start making your own ones.How cool would that be.
Learning to program will get you a job
Given the current state of thing and the rate at which the IT industry is growing, it is very likely that most of us will be working in a computer related field in the near future.
Learning to program will get you a girlfriend
No, I just made that up. No learning to program is not likely to get you a date, not if you spend you evenings in front of a computer coding the night away rather that having fun with your so-called friends, the only dates you are likely to get would be virtual which may be human or an a bot. But if getting a date is your priority then you may as well go do something else like , i don't know, maybe sing songs and post then on you tube maybe.
Now we come to the most important sections of all, oh how long have I been waiting for this.
Myths regarding Programming languages ?
There are many many myths surrounding languages, which programming newbies are confused with,These are things which I have explained to a lot of my noob friends I will bust a these myths here.
1. HTML is not a programming language, the M in HTML stands for Markup.Generally, a programming language allows you to describe some sort of process of doing something, whereas HTML is a way of adding context and structure to text.
2.One of the most popular confusion that people have is that they assume that Javascript has something to do with java since they happen to sound similar.Java and Javascript are similar like Car and Carpet or HAM and HAMSTER are similar .JavaScript was named this way by Netscape to confuse the unwary into thinking it had something to do with Java, the buzzword of the day,a clever marketing technique and it succeeded.
3.Another common confusion is that of people counting Jquery as a language, JQuery is not a programming language, it is a library for javascript programming language.
Conclusion
This brings me to the end of my talk, Hope you liked it, in that case you might wanna re-read it on my blog, rootof3.blogspot.com , and totally make my day by posting a comment or two.
Thanks.